Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[191] person or by representatives. What makes them? The drinking saloons of the city. And to us who pay that taxation, the drinking saloons say, “You shall not execute that plan which the wisdom of the State has devised to prevent the evil.” Every year twenty-five thousand persons are arrested for crime; nine tenths caused by drunkenness, increasing every year. You spent $700,000 on this peninsula, the last twelve months, to educate twenty-five thousand children, to lift them to morals, intelligence, and virtue, All the time two thousand drinking places are open, and they drag down thirty thousand inhabitants,--adults, the grown up, perfect, developed fruit of your schools, drag them down to the pit. You might as well take that $700,000 spent for schools, and fling it over the end of Long Wharf, when with one hand you build, and with the other tear down your building.

These are the serious considerations. Every man who knows his fellows well enough to judge on this question, knows that streets, planted with every fifteenth house a place for the public sale of drink, are not safe streets for a weak man to walk in. Every man of you knows that the mother in the country follows her son into this city with trembling prayers, not knowing whether the virtue she has carefully watched and nurtured will stand the temptation of Boston streets,--the great cancer of the Commonwealth, the source of daily and hourly corruption; and this is the means which the State has devised to stop the otherwise immedicable wound. Now, what do we claim? We have the legislature by argument, the court by enactments. We are ready to meet our opponents any time to reverse the verdict; but, until it is reversed, we claim police officer and jury to carry out the law. If that machinery succeeds, well. If it does not succeed, something more shall